


You'll meet yourself when you surrender

by lonelywalker



Category: The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: Age Difference, F/M, Fake Disability, Older Man/Younger Woman, Secret Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-01
Updated: 2015-03-01
Packaged: 2018-03-15 20:14:25
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,718
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3460478
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lonelywalker/pseuds/lonelywalker
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This has never been about what’s right. It’s only ever been about what they need.</p>
            </blockquote>





	You'll meet yourself when you surrender

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Morten Harket's "End of the Line".

Out of habit, she lies to Cisco about where she’s going this evening. 

She’s told so many lies about the very same destination over the months and years – groceries, laundry, doctor’s appointment, coffee with an old friend – that even now she can’t tell him the truth. Despite the fact he’d shrug and nod and say, “Good idea” today, when before that truth would have led to wide eyes and whispers. No one at S.T.A.R. Labs has ever been invited to Harrison Wells’ home. Not the most senior staff members. Not even Hartley “have I mentioned I’m the Chosen One lately?” Rathaway. But she has.

She’d joined in the water cooler talk, of course, guessed along with the rest of them. “A gothic mansion,” Cisco said. “No, I saw it on Google Earth once,” Ronnie chipped in. But she knows almost every inch of the place. She knows the giant doors he pressed her into once after he’d driven them home. Rain had been beating down on the glass roof above them, but he’d been feverishly hot against her, kissing her as she pulled fogged-up glasses from his eyes. No neighbors could see as she wrapped her legs around his hips, as he pushed her panties aside, as the wind whipped her hair.

Her palm print and eye scan still unlock the door. Had he never erased her from his security settings? Did he renew her clearance after the accident? The doors slide open easily. The hallway is empty.

“Harrison?”

He can monitor all the security feeds from his tablet, as well as everything happening at the lab. This has always been true, but she’s never felt so self-conscious about it as she has lately. Now she and Cisco are the only people he can observe. She hopes they’re both far too boring. What does she even do? Sit and coordinate for Cisco while he’s busy securing the pipeline. She keeps one eye on the news feed about the accident, all the conspiracy theories, all the allegations against Harrison, the speculation about his own condition. There have been plenty of rumors about his death already. She’d had to hunker down in the cab to avoid the bored junior reporters stationed beyond the walls.

She knocks on the half-open door to the bedroom she’s arranged for him on the downstairs level. They’re going to install an elevator for him eventually, but these things take time, and Harrison should barely be out of the hospital. She’d assumed he would spend time in some distant rehab facility where he could recover and escape from press attention. But he’s more capable of being commanding than anyone she’s ever met. “Home,” he’d told her. “I’ll be fine.”

Is he fine? He dislikes her concerns, keeps his medical records from her. But he’s not dying. He’ll get better, up to a point. She won’t lose him too.

He’s sitting up in bed with that tablet, like a teenager recovering from mono: t-shirt, tousled hair, skin that’s too pale by several degrees, and a look of utter exhaustion. Still, he smiles. “Dr. Snow.”

“Dr. Wells.”

They’ve never made love in this bed, in this room. That’s something.

“You told me you were going to get up today.” She folds her arms, half accusatory doctor, half concerned mother. Neither role seems to fit.

“And I did.” He gestures to the wheelchair by the bed – a top-of-the-line model Cisco had procured and then tricked out with everything he could think of to make it seem less like some kind of four-wheel prison. “Painful and humiliating are the words that spring to mind.”

She winces, moves closer. “Are you okay? Your back…” He still has stitches she’s convinced he’ll rip out sooner or later.

“Is fine, so far as I can feel it at all.”

“I should check.”

Harrison’s eyes are a warning. “It’s fine.”

“You just admitted you can’t feel it. Did you fall?” She glances at the outlines of his legs beneath the blankets. “You could bruise yourself badly, even break bones.”

“ _None_ of which would make any practical difference to me.” He has a long, long temper, speaks softly, holds back the rage. But he sets down the tablet and his hand clenches for a moment before he uncurls his fingers and rubs at his forehead instead, slipping off his glasses. “Forgive me. I’m… I haven’t been sleeping.”

Just a tiny admission like that, and she could so easily go to him again, take him in her arms. She settles for standing by the bed. “And you’re not in pain?”

“Nothing worse than a good workout. Or a bad one.”

“The drugs?”

“I don’t take them.”

She’d known that, of course. They’ve had this argument before. They’ve had all the arguments before. He insists nothing works, no painkillers, no sleep aids. He’d laughed at the idea of antidepressants. In the hospital they’d asked her, assuming she was his partner, whether he had a history of drug abuse that might indicate a too-high tolerance level. “Harrison… You have to sleep.”

“I will eventually, I assume.” He sweeps a hand over his eyes and looks up at her. “Maybe I will, if you stay.”

Harrison Wells was a little boy once (although she’s never seen photographs that date back further than the last fifteen years) and he seems almost like one now, begging for solace and company. But she’s heard these lines before, even if he wasn’t seriously injured at the time.

“I can’t stay with you all night.” Not that she has anyone to go home to. Going home at all is something she avoids, because there’s only a lack there now. A lack of Ronnie. Of a purpose. Of a future. She needs to find a new apartment.

Every moment she’s had to herself since the accident, she finds herself dwelling on the great irony of it: that the particle accelerator would kill her life partner and paralyze her sex partner from the waist down. That sort of thing could make a person believe in cosmic forces. Particularly vindictive cosmic forces.

Not that she and Harrison have been intimate lately. Not since the engagement. Not since she made herself break it off. She was going to be married. She and Ronnie were going to have kids in a few years. That woman, that future Dr. Snow-Raymond, couldn’t steal away to her boss’ house on quiet evenings and let him fuck her up against his doors and by his fire and in his shower. She couldn’t wake up with his arms around her, his come still inside her, and groggily lie to Ronnie about late-night research sessions. She’s been virtuously monogamous for months, and paid for it only with that feeling of absence. She’s missed him. Him and his slender not-Ronnie body and whispered not-Ronnie confidences. 

Harrison pats the mattress beside him. “A little while, then.”

Can anything be purely platonic between them? She’d thought not – the very first night they met face to face had been the first night he took her to dinner, and then to bed. Her apartment had been closer that time, although they’d barely made it inside her door, had barely made it to the end of the _meal_. Because he was Harrison Wells, and so much more charming and brilliant in person than she’d ever imagined. And no one had ever wanted her so much, in any way, the way he told her he wanted her that evening.

She folds her coat over a chair, toes off her shoes, and sits. With his disability, this should seem more like a sleepover, or looking after a sick relative. But he’s still Harrison Wells, blue eyes almost luminous in the half-light of the room, and she still remembers what it feels like when he’s inside her.

Harrison grimaces and shifts, passing her the tablet. “Read me something.”

“A bedtime story?” He has a journal article up on the screen, a page or two in: physics that’s over her head, although she recognizes most of the words. Maybe this is the kind of thing he finds relaxing. 

Open in another tab is a news feed about the accident. Another has information about all the wounded survivors. She wonders if he’s had contact with anyone but her and Cisco since he left the hospital. On a completely practical level he doesn’t need to: she’s stocked up the kitchen with food she doubts he’s touched at all, and although she’d wanted to hire security he’s insistent that his automated systems can handle anything. No doubt his email inbox is overflowing with either accusations or concern. Has he been reading them? Replying?

Hers has more unread messages in it than ever before: old school friends asking if she’s okay, condolences from everyone who’d seen Ronnie’s name on the list of seventeen dead, requests for interviews from major newspapers and networks. There’s even a job offer in there from an old professor who’d always had a soft spot for her. She hasn’t replied yet, but it’s a tiny bit of comfort amid the storm. It’s a way out. She could just up and leave. Spend five years doing pure research deep in a lab, and try the job market again when she could omit S.T.A.R. Labs from her resume entirely. There’s no career left here, just a burnt-out shell of a lab, the ghost of Ronnie Raymond, and…

And Harrison Wells, his head leaned against her shoulder as they both lie back against the pillows he’s stacked in a slope. Her boss. Her lover. Her friend. He has no one else. _No one_ else. Cisco is fiercely loyal, but there’s no chance in a million years he’d be here with Harrison now. He wouldn’t even dare to ring the doorbell.

His breathing eases as she reads, and he’s warm against her, smelling fresher than she would have expected. Maybe his humiliating jaunt in the wheelchair had included a shower – also now adapted for him. He’d shaved, although tackling a comb was obviously a bridge too far.

What would she have done if he had been the one to die in the pipeline? He could have insisted he go instead of Ronnie, although in no world can she imagine Harrison winning that argument anymore than she can imagine Cisco being the man left in there. Ronnie was supremely confident and stubborn, and had the skills to back all of it up.

And if Ronnie were the one with her now? Paralyzed, hurting? This is what she would be doing for him too. Looking after him. If not putting him back together, then helping him while he did it himself.

“Caitlin…”

She’d hoped he was asleep. Not so she could leave – what else is she going to do tonight? – but because he needed it so badly. If anything, she’d have liked him to be so soundly asleep that he wouldn’t even know if she snuggled down beside him and held him, held his warm, breathing, alive body, and told herself this was what she _had_ to hold onto, for all their sakes.

“Shh,” she says, still looking at endless words on the screen, hoping not to break the spell. But his hand is already a gentle pressure at the crease of her thigh.

“Cait, I…”

She wants to snap at him – _Don’t call me that!_ – but in truth she loves it when he does. She tilts the tablet away so she can see his hand, then risks glancing at him. His eyes are open, vivid and clear, and she’d know that expression anywhere. The precursor to so many nights with him between her legs, moving _just_ how her body needed him to move. “Oh God…” It’s only the barest whisper. “We can’t.”

Harrison can still kiss her, though, his hand cupping her cheek, guiding her mouth to his. It’s always been impossible for her not to want him, although it’s always, _always_ been wrong: he’s older, he’s her boss, she’s engaged, she’s grieving. Maybe that’s what makes it possible for her to kiss him back, to roll over and press her body to his one more time. Because this has never been about what’s right. It’s only ever been about what they need.

“Oh God,” she says against his lips, his tongue. “Oh God…” But she has to hold back what comes next in her mind, what her body is begging for – _fuck me_ – because he can’t anymore. And normally she’d be ripping off that t-shirt (except it’d be a dress shirt), desperate to touch him. Now she knows about the bandages beneath and she doesn’t want to hurt him, or remind him, or for any of this to end. It’s not as if paraplegics don’t have sex, and it’s a good sign, isn’t it, that he wants to? They can find a way. If not today, then after some really extensive and Safe-Search-Off Googling.

Harrison levers himself up on one elbow, ducking his head to kiss the hollow of her throat, his hand smoothing down over her oh-so-professional blouse, thumb finding a nipple. “Caitlin… I’m not made of glass.”

“I know.” But he is made of all-too-fragile flesh and blood, with a splintered spine, with wounds held together by thread. She buries her hands in his hair as he unbuttons her blouse and pushes the bra straps down from her shoulders. Before he even kisses her breasts, suckles on one hard, sensitive nipple, she _knows_ she’s wet, achingly so, her hips unconsciously rising, thighs spreading. She reaches down and tugs on his t-shirt with both hands.

For a man who’s barely been out of bed in a month, he hasn’t lost much muscle mass. The very first time, she’d been impressed and delighted that any quantum physicist could have arms like that. Most of the men around S.T.A.R. Labs couldn’t even aspire to a flat stomach. Of course Harrison was no Ronnie, but… “Have you been doing push-ups?”

Harrison laughs. “No, but they’re the only limbs I have left. Might as well make the most of them.”

She wriggles out of her blouse, unclasps the bra. Her skin against his, hot and vital. He kisses her while one hand loosens her belt, the fly of her pants. She’s breathing hard, moaning into his mouth, before his fingers ever slide down over her panties. “Please, Harrison…”

“Shh, I’ll take care of you.”

There are enough things, for the moment, to push away the thought that _she_ should be taking care of _him_. She has to get out of her clothes. And she has to have him, one way or another.

Really, it’s astonishing how little difference legs make when they’re like this, lying side by side, although maybe it shouldn’t be surprising at all. One day soon he’ll be using the wheelchair and everything will be different. But for now, what does it matter when she lies back against his pillows as he kisses her thighs, fingers her wetness, meets her eyes with a mischievous smile?

He might know her body better than his own. Knows how to tease her with his tongue until, inevitably, she’s begging him, cursing him, fingers twisted so tight in his thick hair it _has_ to hurt. His fingers inside her aren’t enough, exactly – and she hates herself for thinking that – but they’re enough for now. She pushes up against him and finally he lets her have what she wants, lapping at her clit as pure relief flows and expands into a perfect physical joy that saps what little breath she still has. And somehow, somehow, she’s still able to cry out his name when she comes.

Afterward, she only wants to sleep.

The bed is _him_ , smells and feels of him, and she wants to drowsily wrap herself up in it and push all thoughts away. When he moves up alongside her again, she nuzzles his shoulder, throws his arm around her, and he’s good enough, or tired enough, to simply hold her and kiss her hair.

Something keeps her from drifting off entirely, though, something niggling she can’t easily pinpoint. It takes her a few moments to realize it’s not concern about being here with him. Not grief or regret or anguish. It’s something much more physical.

She opens her eyes. Moves her hand. Pulls away a little. “Harrison?”

“Hm?”

“Can you…?” Her fingers curl around him, feeling his shape through his soft cotton sweatpants, his hardness where he’d been prodding her hip. “Can you feel this?” Stroking him, it’s almost unbelievable that he can’t. But then his legs would seem just as alive, just as normal.

His brow furrows. “It’s not…” He takes a breath and his eyes meet hers. “It’s not the same.”

“Does it feel good?” 

Another breath, and then his features relax slightly. He lets himself smile. “Yes, but I don’t know if I can…” His eyes narrow with tension once more. “I don’t want it to be awkward for you.”

It’s not awkward, not awkward at all, to sit astride him once he’s pulled himself up, to push down his sweatpants and touch him like she has so many times before. If anything, everything seems so much more comfortable, safer, more intimate than it ever has in the past. What would this be like if Harrison had never been injured in the explosion? Would she be here at all? Would she even still be in the city?

She cups his face in her hands, kissing him as she slides down onto him, her breath catching at the way he stretches her, fills her, touches her deep inside. “Oh God, that’s…” It’s perfect, is what it is. Obscenely so.

Harrison lets out a groan of frustration, and she kisses him again before he can say anything else about being inadequate. So he can’t raise his hips and fuck her hard like he used to. He’s still here, still has a mouth and hands and everything else about him that has always driven her crazy, tipping her over the edge into desire she can’t understand or control.

It’s easiest for her to lean back against his chest, which lets him hold her, kiss her, touch her breasts while she moves over him, guide her hips into some kind of rhythm he likes, and dip his fingers down to circle her clit, feel himself inside her. She badly wants to ask him what it feels like for him, how good it is, if he can come this way. But nine tenths of all that might be psychology, and she can’t start questioning it. Besides, the way his breathing gets faster, the way he starts murmuring _“oh Cait”_ by her ear, are answers in themselves.

Soon, though, she’s closer than she’d like to be, his fingers stroking more insistently, stirring up a fire in her that burns from her belly all the way down her tensed thighs. She’s going to come, _needs_ to come, and she can’t stop moving, fucking herself on his gorgeous, sinful body.

She closes her eyes, shuts her mouth as if she could stop it happening just by smothering her own cry of blissful, absolute release. Her body tenses, spasms, clenches around his delicious hardness, and… and it’s Harrison who cries out wordlessly, grasping her tightly in his arms. She feels him come, some involuntary movement that doesn’t depend on a broken, malfunctioning spinal cord, and that might even be better than her own orgasm, although the two are so mixed up in her brain she can’t split them apart. 

“Hey,” she says eventually, when he’s stilled and slackened his hold on her, when she feels steady enough to speak at all.

Harrison brushes her hair aside and kisses her neck. “So,” he says softly. “I believe this experiment was a success, Dr. Snow.”

“Reproducibility is a cornerstone of science, Dr. Wells.” She eases off him, rolls over to one side. If she thought there was a chance he’d let her, she’d ask to check on his bandages. Not to mention get some new scans, determine what the true extent of his injury might be. Obviously it’s not _quite_ as complete as the hospital experts had led them to believe.

Across the room, her coat is buzzing. Probably Cisco. She’d had to purchase a new cell after the explosion, and only her parents, Cisco, and Harrison have the number. Maybe he wants to order Chinese for dinner, wants to know if she’ll go halfsies. She lays her cheek against Harrison’s chest, taking comfort in his heartbeat. “Since you refuse to take your pills, I guess you could offer me a drink.” Surely one medical no-no can cancel out another. At least some of the time.

One of the benefits of having an unimaginably rich lover (at least, she assumes he’s unimaginably rich, and it wouldn’t take much to dwarf her own savings) is that his bar is always stocked with the very best. Her feet bare on the cool marble floor, she wonders, vaguely, how much he’s been self-medicating with bourbon lately. But they sit in bed and chat and sip their way through half a bottle as evening erodes into a full, moonless night.

“You need to get up tomorrow,” she says. They had this same conversation yesterday, but then she wasn’t naked with him beneath blankets, her foot unconsciously rubbing his calf.

“I will.”

“And _stay_ up.”

“Mm…” He combs his fingers through her hair, draws her closer to him. “I need to get back to the lab.”

Now she wants to take it all back. Better for him to stay in bed for another week than try to resume his work. It’ll be traumatic for him, both mentally and physically, to return to the scene of his greatest failure. She doesn’t want to see him bleed. Not again.

“What you need is to take things one step at a time.”

He chuckles, his almost-empty glass clinking against hers. “One _revolution_ at a time.”

Later, when he’s finally asleep, she holds him, letting her fingertips brush over the gauze taped to the small of his back. Wounds do heal, and maybe not so badly as she’d once thought. It’s time to stop being afraid of the scars.


End file.
